The California Hot Rod Reunion With Don Prudhomme

Meeting famous racers is cool. Getting to interview them is even cooler. Getting to spend a day hanging out with them at a historic racetrack? Well, that’s absolutely subzero. We recently had a chance to spend a day with Top Fuel driver, multitime NHRA champion, and team owner Don “The Snake” Prudhomme at the NHRA California Hot Rod Reunion held at Auto Club Famoso Raceway in Bakersfield, California. Prudhomme was promoting the upcoming Snake and Mongoose movie (see SnakeandMongooseMovie.com) and graciously let us tag along while he talked tuning with former crew chief Roland Leong, mused on the future of nostalgia racing, and reminisced about the joys and dangers of the early days. Read the story, then hit the video page on HOTROD.com to see more of our day with the Snake.

On the Bakersfield Track

Prudhomme got his first major Top Fuel victory in 1962 on the Bakersfield quarter-mile, and when asked if he felt a special kinship to the track, he said, “Bakersfield is an important track to a lot of us; used to be called the Smokers Fuel and Gas Championship. In the early ’60s, late ’50s, this track was one of the few that ran nitromethane, so cars would come from all over the country to run here, and once the guys discovered nitro, they didn’t want to run anything else. We ran our Army car and Hot Wheels cars here. Winning here put us on the map. Bakersfield was the first big place to run ’em. This is where it all started.”

1/11

On Money

“What happens is—and I’m one of the guys who screwed the whole deal up, you know, I’m one of the guys who went out and got sponsorship money and started building better engines and better superchargers and then the next guy’s gonna do this and that and pretty soon it costs you over a million dollars to run the car—nowadays maybe over $4 million, but that’s professional competition. It’s kinda the beauty of the sport, because you can think better and build a better part and the rules are so vague, racers can get around all the rules. You know, they say, ‘You can only have a fuel pump flow so many gallons per minute’ and these guys get on a flow bench and say, ‘Yeah, but if we put a bigger fuel line here and do this and that…’ They got a $100,000 flow bench. They got blower dynos to get the very best blower they can. A blower dyno is $250,000. I had one. I know.”

2/11

On the Fun of Nostalgia Racing

The NHRA Heritage racing series is really taking off. It’s not yet like the ’60s, when 100 fuel cars would crowd the pits, but there were several dozen vintage-style racers in attendance. We suggested that the popularity of the event was because the racing was more fun, but Prudhomme didn’t agree. “You know racing, even at the nostalgia level, you watch some of the guys at the starting line, and they’re very, very disappointed [when they don’t win]. It’s a lot, a lot of work, and when the car’s not running well, you go home with that. They might say, it’s not a big deal, but it is a big deal and it works on you and works on you. Nostalgia or in the big leagues, you have sponsors. NHRA Top Fuel, you got million-dollar bills to pay. It’s way more involved than just going down that quarter-mile.”

3/11

On the Future of Nostalgia Racing

“You come out here and you see a couple of tractor trailer rigs pull in the pits, all professional and you know, I love Dale Worsham and Jim Head and Chad Head and all those guys, but they have the best money can buy, they got the talent guys, and will they screw it up? Probably. Yeah, they probably will, but I think that’s part of it. That’s what happens. Don’t know how to fix it. Happens in F1, in NASCAR. The only way you can fix it is to have a breakout rule; You go too fast, you’re not in, but that’s kind of a chickens**t, cheesy thing to do.”

4/11

On Old Rivalries

The California Hot Rod Reunion features Nostalgia Funny Cars in many familiar paint schemes of the ’60s and ’70s. An earlier Ford version of Raymond Beadle’s Blue Max Funny Car beat Prudhomme at Indy in ’75 (above), and Snake is slow to forgive. We teased him in the pits as a later version of the car—a Plymouth Arrow (far left)—rolled by, asking, “Does it still make you grit your teeth?” “Of course! Every time you got your ass whupped, you got mad. Raymond and I, we’re buddies now. Back then, racing the Blue Max and whatnot; say you had a bad run and a disagreement at one track. When you go to race a guy they’re going to try to screw you every way possible and you them—fight over who is going to stage first. Say you’re slow to start, they’ll say you did it on purpose to burn them down. You can’t do that now. Back then it was like the Old West.”

5/11

On the NHRA

“I think more than anything I was surprised that drag racing lasted this long. When it first started out it was like, who in the heck can afford to keep doing this? But then NHRA got formed and started putting money up. Throughout the whole history of NHRA they were always number one. IHRA and AHRA were excellent too, though, because they would book you to run. In the old days, that’s how you made a living, barnstorming around the country. NHRA, they wouldn’t pay you to race so we’d do one or two NHRA races and then go do match races the rest of the time. You could make maybe $500, $600 running at some little dragstrip in say, Alton, Illinois, and leave there and go to Maryland, or wherever the heck you were, all over the country. There was a time we’d run 70 dates a year. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, every day at a different track. NHRA, through HOT ROD and the media coverage, eventually became the only game, but they learned a lot from AHRA.”

6/11

On Retirement

“I was 54 when I retired from driving and we finished Second in the championship. I don’t know why or how I carried on and a lot of guys didn’t. I can just tell you that I had a really burning desire to do it, and I gave it everything that I had. It wasn’t about the money. It was about the cars and winning races. If you do something well—your hobby, you do it long enough, you can make a living doing it. To own race teams and learn about the business, it’s been quite a journey. I’m used to it now. The first couple of years when I retired, it was tough. I wasn’t around racing. I didn’t watch it. I had to get away from it. It was such an intense time. I didn’t know anything else. I couldn’t see anything but that quarter-mile. I can see a lot further than that now. I can see almost a mile. Things have changed but it took a little time.”

7/11

On 1,000-Foot Racing

“Now they’re going faster in the 1,000-foot than they were in the quarter-mile. It was a Band-Aid. It’s amazing to see new times and records. People still like that. Whether it’s two horses or two cars, both of them want to win.”

8/11

On Being a “People Person”

“Was I a jerk? Oh yeah, I coulda been. Sometimes I feel bad when I think about it. I think I was just very, very, very intense. It was nothing personal. I didn’t want to take one minute of time off of what I was doing because the job was so important to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like people.”

9/11

On Old Push Starting

Up until the mid-’70s, Top Fuel cars had to be push-started. A parade of push vehicles and dragsters started at the top end of the dragstrip, heading toward the starting line, often at high speeds. Once fired, they’d make the turn, or be pushed by hand back and into staging since the cars did not have reverse gears. “These staging lanes [at Bakersfield] are the exact same as they were in the ’60s. The only difference was, we were at the other end. We’d push down this way, fire ’em up, and make the turn. Reversers, that made life so much easier. Before that you had to push them back after the burnout. You used to pick your crew based on how big they were. They’d be running around the car, putting bleach under the tires, pants falling down, big ass falling out. It would piss Wally [Parks] off, made us look bad.”

10/11

On the “Snake” Nickname

11/11

Asking about this raised a chorus of giggles from Prudhomme’s entourage. “You going to tell her the locker-room story?” teased one of his friends. To his credit, Prudhomme blushed. We mentioned thinking it referenced his quick reactions and ice-cold killer instinct on the racetrack. “It did, it did,” said Prudhomme, somewhat gratefully.

See the Video!

Our day with Prudhomme is reflected in an 8-minute video that includes racing action at Bakersfield and some time with Nostalgia Top Fuel’s Adam Sorokin. See it at HOTROD.com/2013/April.